When a gunman opened
fire at a Pittsburgh
synagogue in October,
everything changed for
the head of a Silver
Spring-based refugee
resettlement agency
‘A TOTALLY
NEW WORLD’

ON A SATURDAY MORNING in late
October, Mark Hetfield’s life changed
forever. He was attending a bar mitzvah in downtown Washington when the
silenced cellphone in his chest pocket
“kept buzzing and buzzing and buzzing.”
He finally left the service but didn’t want
to seem disrespectful. “I tried to hide
so people wouldn’t see me using a cellphone outside the synagogue,” he says.

Hetfield is president of HIAS, theoldest refugee resettlement agency in theworld, which is headquartered in SilverSpring. One of the calls was from CNN.

An assault on a synagogue in Pittsburghhad killed 11 people, he was told, andthe gunman had posted this message onsocial media: “HIAS likes to bring invad-ers in that kill our people. I can’t sit byand watch my people get slaughtered.Screw your optics, I’m going in.”When he heard the news, he recalls,“It was just total disbelief, it was such ashock. I was thinking it couldn’t possiblybe true. It doesn’t even make sense.” Butit was true. And at that moment, Hetfieldentered “a totally new world,” he told meone evening in November.

He pulled his wife out of the bar mitzvah and they went to a nearby co;ee shop,
where he continued to make calls and
learn more details. ;e next few days were
a blur. Hetfield and his colleagues did more
than a hundred media interviews. He canceled a trip to Nairobi and flew instead to
Pittsburgh to console survivors, then on
to New York to meet with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. P H

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banter | HOMETOWN

Mark Het;eld
is president of
HIAS, the refugee
resettlement agency
that a gunman
referenced on social
media before a
mass shooting.